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NDISwrapper 1.59 Now Supports Modern Kernels

11-28-2013, 06:50 PM

Phoronix: NDISwrapper 1.59 Now Supports Modern Kernels

With most WiFi adapters and other network hardware having native Linux drivers these days, there hasn't been much to report on with the NDISwrapper project in months -- the project that allows using Windows network drivers on Linux. Changing that is today's NDISwrapper 1.59 release...

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Unfortunately Linux Wifi drivers are often problematic. I had trouble with the 3 USB wireless hardware I bought? The first one stopped working for 2 months and I had to use the 3.0 LTS kernel during that time. The second one didn?t work at all with the kernel driver and I had to rebuild a modified version of the vendor?s driver for each kernel update. And the third one has an extremely bad and unstable ping (and spams dmesg) unless I disable power saving.

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I just recently obtained two PCI wifi cards with a Marvell W8300 chipset. No Linux driver for this thing, there was one in development many years ago, but it didn't get finished and got removed from the kernel. Ndiswrapper to the rescue, an old machine of mine now has an internet connection.

The second link is really interesting... especially when you look at table 2, but being cognizant of the fact that "others" basically means flip phones and... desktop linux.
.... a billion... is a big number, isn't it?

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I just recently obtained two PCI wifi cards with a Marvell W8300 chipset. No Linux driver for this thing, there was one in development many years ago, but it didn't get finished and got removed from the kernel. Ndiswrapper to the rescue, an old machine of mine now has an internet connection.

I'm no stranger to ndiswrapper.

There was a time when the iwlwifi (yes Intel) driver was plagued by link speed issues over the n band. I has to use XP drivers in ndiswrapper to get decent wifi speed on Linux.

Ndiswrapper only makes sense these days if your product does not have Linux drivers and was old enough to have had XP drivers

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First off ndiswrapper is extremely important, and needs to be updated to support NDIS6. There is almost no excusable reason why it's even taken this long, it's not like NDIS6 hasn't been the standard NDIS for years.

Second it's always best to use the native drivers, which recently hasn't been a problem for the community. I unfortunately know this won't always be the state of affairs. First there was no drivers, and then there was solid wireless B drivers... then there was no wireless G drivers, then there was solid support again. This pattern repeated itself until today, where we have good wireless N drivers. Just wait though, a new standard comes out along with new reference chips. Then we'll be screwed again, and we need to have a good ndiswrapper in reserve.

So ndiswrapper asshats, get your asses together and support NDIS6. Excuse time was over a couple years ago, this is ridiculous.